IAB Attempts to Define Benchmark for Social Media

Figuring out the ROI on social media is always a crap shoot. Yes, we know that it’s usually a good idea to have a social strategy, but it’s always a challenge selling it through to clients without hard numbers. So, we sometimes fudge a bit.

According to MarketingVox, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has just released their attempt to quantify the ROI of social media:

The sheet divides the social media landscape into three major categories (and associated metrics):

• General Social Media Sites. Quantifiers include: unique visitor, cost per unique visitor, page views, return visits, time spent.
• Blogs. Quantifiers: conversation reach, number of conversation relevant sites, content, freshness, relevance.
• Widgets and Social Media Applications. Quantifiers: number of installs, number of active users, longevity, user profiles.

The idea is to create a consistent standard in order to create growth within the social media space.

The report can be downloaded here from the IAB: Social-Media-Metrics-Definitions-0509.pdf

[Via MarketingVox ]

No Comments / May 06.09 / Media / by Andrew Marconi

How to Normalize URLs & Keep Google Happy

This is something I always (1) forget to do, and (2) forget how to do. Simply add this code (modified for your domain name, of course) to your .htaccess file.

This is important to implement for your search engine ranking. Google, for example, thinks www.domain.com is a different site from domain.com, and this can seriously impact where you rank in Google. There are other ways of doing this, but the below is the only one that doesn’t spit back a 500 error on my server, for some reason.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you want to force ‘www’ on the front end of your URL, switch it up with:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[Via DZone Snippets]

No Comments / May 06.09 / Programming / by Andrew Marconi